US House votes to repeal abortion-expanding health care law

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 19, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a 245-189 vote Wednesday evening, the US House of Representatives voted to repeal President Obama’s massive health care reform law.

A Quinnipiac University poll released last year found that more than two thirds of Americans (67%) oppose government funding of abortion under health care reform. And according to a recent Gallup/USA Today survey, only 13 percent of Americans want the law to remain on the books as written.

Family Research Council (FRC) praised the House of Representatives for overturning the health care law, decried by pro-life groups as the biggest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade.

While momentum for repealing the bill was strong in the House ever since the November elections that handed the chamber to the GOP, the repeal is not expected to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate. Nonetheless, FRC president Tony Perkins noted that the House vote sent a message of the bill’s widespread unpopularity that the Obama administration should listen to.

“The American people, the House of Representatives and 26 states have sent a message that President Obama and the U.S. Senate would be unwise to ignore: ‘Repeal’ is the only response to the incompetence found throughout the health care takeover law,” stated Perkins.

In a meeting with the Chicago Tribune earlier this week, Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel admitted that the protections against abortion funding in the Executive Order, issued to assuage pro-life fears over the bill, do not “exist by law” and therefore, he said, was weak enough to satisfy the most hardened pro-abortion legislators.

“It’s now obvious that from the very beginning, that the Obama Administration had no intention of preventing federal funding of abortion,” said Perkins. “The American people, regardless of their view of the underlying issue, should not be forced to pay for someone’s abortion.”